I had tried to post about this before but don't know what happened. Please excuse if this is a duplicate post.

My 99' had very intermittent starting problems and to make a long story short, I wound up replacing everything except the neutral switch in the transaxle. Before doing that I had a hunch that I may have a grounding problem so I jury rigged a ground to the engine. Problem disappeared.

Now to find the cause, I unhooked the battery cables and the negative cable fell out in my hand. The clown designers at Nissan had put a compression fitting about a foot or so from the cable end on the negative cable (Why? - Who knows) and it had worked itself loose over the years.

So if you are having starting problems, the negative cable may be the first thing to look at.

 

The ground wire connects to the chassis, under the intake box, then to the engine with some lame little bracket. The chassis connection must have corroded and loosened up. Good catch.

 

Big 3 upgrade is always a good idea for any car.

 

Nope! Here is a pic of the cable. The splice was before the cable connected to the chassis and then on to the block. I have had this car since it was new and I surely didn't do this and have always done my own maintenance. The splice had a plastic cover over it (see pic) so it wasn't apparent by looking at the cable. The end just came apart in my hand when I removed the cable end from the battery.

 

AFAIK Nissan didn't use a cast battery terminal clamp. You sure you didn't have someone install a battery and make "improvements"?

 

Boy, being an old fart, I am trying to remember if that maybe did happen in 2003 when the second battery went in. If so, I am out of line blaming design for the problem.

Thanks for jogging my memory.

 

Yea looks like they added that length in there to avoid replacing the whole thing and didnt know how to clamp right lol. Nissan had very few design flaws on the 4th gen in general

 

Lets not get carried away here. I invite you to search the TSBs for the 4th gen. There are very few cars that have "very few design flaws".

 

nissan put in the compression fitting midway down as a chassis ground mine has it too 99.5 sel its there for a reason and mad expensive to get from nissan like 78 bucks i think

 

That's not on my 99.5 SEL.

That cable is an aftermarket. The OEM battery connector isn't cast. It's a sleeve clamp style. It's obvious somebody spliced that new end onto the wire.

 

Agreed. This cable is not OEM but if you want to ewplace, use the 00-01 cable. It has an extra grounding point.